You were born transgender

You have been given a golden opportunity to partake in self creation

A brave and right choice that not many will understand

You have the option to own your body

To choose who you will be in the world

You could recognize the person in the mirror

You could love the person in the mirror

You could change and be better for it

Remember

Transsexuals, keep going

Nothing you will see is unprecedented

You will find yourself beastial and pulled apart

They will try to kill you and they might succeed

They do not want you here

But don’t we know what they don’t?

There is nowhere in the world we’re meant to be

So don’t we know the spaces between?

We find each other there

We will try to save you and we might succeed

And you will find yourself strange and created

Nothing you are is unprecedented

The ones who refused to back down

Pluck and preen scars of all sorts

And grin and gleam

See what it took? See what I survived?

And there is no one more forged

Than the living transsexual!

And there’s the shadows too,

Who do not look

And stayed hunkered down

Unwilling or unable

A diversity of half lives

The phrase that echoes in my mind

I’d love to see us decrepit

Old men too sore to shout

Have a cigarette on the porch

While I have a coffee

Broken in shoes and worn leather skin

I think about you not so strained

Ugly and pleased, handsome to me

Humming songs a half century old

So changed we’re strangers to the present